nicole

We got hit by Tropical Storm Nicole last night.  She dumped over five inches of rain on our heads.  I hate to complain, because we really needed the rain. 

However, when we woke up this morning and went out into the kitchen, we found this:

Muddy little kitty paw prints all over the kitchen floor (this picture is photoshopped to hide all of the other dirt on the floor straight out of the camera).  When we see muddy kitty prints in the kitchen, our hearts sink with dread.  Why?  Because we know that when we go around the corner, we will look down the stairs and see this:

That bowl you see at the end of the hallway doesn't belong there.  It floated there through the doorway to the right, by the light switch.  The mud doesn't belong there, either.

Our 60-year-old house has floor drains in the basement that drain out to the ditch by the road.  Most of the time, this is not a problem.  But, when the ditch fills up to the top (like when a hurricane or tropical storm blows through), the water level in the ditch is higher than our basement, and the muddy water comes flowing back up the drains.  Yuck.  Fortunately, by the time we saw this, the water had receded and we were just left with the muck.  I spent the afternoon hosing it all back down the drains. It still smells pretty earthy down there, but at least we can go down to do a load of laundry without making footprints all over the house when we come back up.

It's our fault, really - we have plugs that we use for times like this - we just pop them into the drains and screw them down tight, and they keep a lot of the water outside where it belongs.  But we forgot to put them in yesterday.  Even when Hubby was smart enough to move the brand-new, expensive bag of prescription cat food up off the floor so that it wouldn't get wet.  And even when I got up at 2:00 in the morning to check on the basement because it was raining so hard outside (the basement was bone dry at the time).  I even thought to myself, "oh, I should put the plugs in just in case," but I really just wanted to go back to bed.  So I did.  Bad decision.

Fortunately, we have learned not to keep anything of importance on the floor down there, so there was no real harm done, and I was able to get rid of most of the muck.  Hopefully we've learned our lesson.

Oh.  Remember these?

I'm afraid they don't like having five inches of rain dumped on them.  They now look like this:

Soggy and covered in mold.  We are so, so sad.  And making a note to dry them INSIDE next time.